The American Woods: Exhibited By Actual Specimens And With Copious Explanatory Text, Part 13

The American Woods: Exhibited By Actual Specimens And With Copious Explanatory Text, Part 13 Summary:

146 Pages
Plates Included
Year: 1913 PREFACE
While the southern end of the peninsula of Florida and its many
neighboring islands are not strictly within the tropics, in the sense of
extending below the Tropic of Cancer, their flora is distinctly tropical
nevertheless. That is doubtless due to the fact that the warm waters
of the Gulf Stream wash their shores and bring thither the climate
and conditions of the tropics lying not many miles to the southward.
Undoubtedly the same currents, too, lodge upon their shores the fruits
and growing parts of trees and other plants of tropical origin, and
their establishment there becomes a matter of course. Hence it is
that we may consider the flora of southern Florida and keys as distinctly
tropical.
As one enters the region from northern Florida he notices an almost
complete change of vegetation as he passes a line extending across the
peninsula approximately from Tampa Bay to Cape Canaveral. The
species he was familiar with in northern Florida have one after another,
with very few exceptions, been left behind, and the strange species of
the tropics have taken their places. Probably what has impressed him
first of the change is the appearance of the Cocoanut and Royal Palms',
with their enormous plume-like leaves waving in the breezes. On
reaching the "hammocks" of southern Florida he finds the change
quite complete, and he cannot fail to be impressed at the amazing
number of new trees, shrubs and vines which he finds within a given
area. They are mostly evergreen and some are found to be in both
flower and fruit most of the year through, or to produce flowers and
fruit more than once each year, entirely at variance with the habits of
northern species.
Such trees commence growth at germination and apparently continue
it until old age with very little if any periods of rest. As one
might infer, such trees shew very little if any evidence of annual rings,
in the cross-section of their wood, and he finds his old ideas of being
able to determine the age of a tree by counting its annual layers of
growth (rings in cross section) do not apply here. But that is not the
only nor the chief surprise that awaits him, if he look further into
tree-growth. He finds that in the wood of one species at least, the
Black Mangrove, Avicennia nitida, there are no medullary rays that
extend from year to year, such as he was familiar with in woods in
general ; and furthermore that its annual rings, if such they may be,
are not continuous at all but very much broken and sometimes even
with ends overlapping. In another wood, that of the Strong-back,
Bourreria kavanensis, there is a remarkable intermingling of a firm
wood tissue and a very frail pith-like tissue, at variance again with his
ideas of wood-structure as ordinarily understood.
The woods of twenty-five species of these tropical trees have been
collected and are shown in the illustrative specimens of this volume.
After an extended experience in collecting and sectioning woods,
covering now over three hundred species, for use in AMERICAN WOODS
(See announcement at the close of this volume), the writer has not,
in all of them together, found as many surprises in unusual structures,
etc., as he has found in gathering those for this volume. Of a few of
them it was found impossible to make transverse sections suitable for
use, owing to their brittle nature. Of others we were unable to make
sections of the standard thickness adopted in AMERICAN WOODS, but
we could make them thinner. A few of the transverse sections we
have had to reduce in size, and the very thin ones we have had to protect
with celluloid or mica on account of their fragile nature.
In the preparation of this work I wish to gratefully acknowledge
assistance in the field-work by Dr. John Gifford, of Cocoanut Grove,
Florida, to whom it is my pleasure to dedicate the volume. For
information on the colloquial names in foreign languages by which
these trees are known in the tropics I wish to express my gratitude to
Dr. H. Pittier, Mr. C. D. Mell, and Dr. C. F. Millspaugh.
LOWVILLE, N. Y., Nov. 28, 1913.

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